The COG-or: the Improved Functional Annotation of Bacterial Genomes

Abstract

The study of bacterial organisms is given great emphasis in scientific research. By studying the bacterial genome, scientists can gain knowledge of various infectious diseases. Nowadays, it is even possible to edit genes and thus advancing the field of tailored medicine by treating many genetic diseases. Furthermore, it is becoming the norm to utilize bacteria in the industry for their ability to produce important products such as plastics, or fuels. It is therefore essential to extract the necessary information about its genes and other features. This paper focuses mainly on improving the functional annotation of bacterial genomes, classification of protein-coding sequences into clusters of orthologous groups, and visualization of the final annotated genome. For this task, the python package was developed with several functions for working with the outputs of multiple annotation tools, namely eggNOG-mapper, Operon-mapper, and Batch CD-Search. The package was tested on Clostridium diolis DSM 15410 and Clostridium beijerinckii DSM 791.